It’s not enough that we’ve bailed out big banks, are staring at $16 trillion in debt and face a run-up in entitlement spending that even the president once described as unsustainable. Congress appears determined to fashion another fiscal anchor to drape around our necks.

It is doing its best to hamstring the U.S. Postal Service such that in a few years there will be no choice but to bail it out, too.

And that particular aid package could cost $47 billion, according to the Postal Service itself.

The latest example of this congressional myopia is its veto last week of Postal Service plans to drop Saturday delivery of first-class mail — and never mind polls showing most Americans understand the need for this $2 billion cost-saving tactic. Worse, the rescue of Saturday delivery capped several years of congressional meddling in postal operations, with both Democrats and Republicans among the busybodies.

Last year, Congress forced the Postal Service to roll back most of its plans to close 3,700 post offices and 250 mail processing centers. A press release at the time from Sen. Michael Bennet’s office recounted, for example, how he and Sen. Mark Udall, a fellow Democrat, had pressured the Postal Service repeatedly since 2011 to temper its streamlining plans. Udall’s office meanwhile complained about postal “decisions made by bureaucrats in Washington” — as if second-guessing by politicians in Washington is usually of a higher order.

Not to be outdone, Republican Reps. Scott Tipton and Cory Gardner also saddled up a posse against post office closures. While insisting they favored postal reform, they said they preferred the agency “take a bottom-up approach that utilizes actual cost savings rather than a top-down approach focused on an arbitrary revenue figure” — and if you have any idea what that means, you too may have a future in elected politics.

Such exasperating interference has goaded some commentators into pleading with Congress to be reasonable, but this sentiment misreads how politics works. Congress hamstrings postal management because it can and because some very vocal constituents want it to. Perhaps the only hope for liberating management is to transform the Postal Service into a regulated private enterprise still required to provide universal service but beyond the reach of politicians.

Granted, in the present environment such a move is a long shot, but it’s not as radical as it may sound. Other countries, notably Germany and the Netherlands, have privatized their postal service as well as abolished postal monopolies, with encouraging results. If the Postal Service crisis deepens — which it surely will as demand for its services declines — even Congress may begin to look around for a serious alternative to the present structure.

The issue needn’t be partisan, either. Peter Orszag, President Obama’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, endorsed the idea in a column last year — emphasizing that while “privatized entities do not, on average, become miraculously more productive than public agencies,” pursuing one in this instance would at least “take Congress out of the picture.”

“In sectors from telecommunications to electricity,” Orszag noted, “universal service does not require government ownership.”

It is sometimes argued that the Postal Service would be in decent shape if it weren’t hobbled by the unique burden of having to pre-fund future retirees’ health benefits, but that analysis assumes declining mail volume isn’t the larger threat over the long run. In any event, who in 2006 mandated the pre-funding requirement anyway?

As if you couldn’t guess.

E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter @vcarrollDP